Question

When I print the value of a CFString constant e.g. an AddressBook label in the console, the output value is _$!<home>!$_. How do I extract only the pure value, e.g home? ANy help would be greatly appreciated please.

Answer 1

Not all string constants have all that gubbins around them – it just happens that someone decided that the address book ones do. Therefore, I don’t think there’s any built-in function to remove them.

That makes this problem a simple “How do I remove characters?” question. There are many solutions to this, but a simple one is:

NSString *label = @"_$!<home>!$_";

NSString *rawLabel = [[label stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"_$!<" withString:@""] 
                    stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@">!$_" withString:@""];